Any B2B publisherongoing
Production Twenty pieces a month, and nothing compounds
- What was done
A team commits to twenty posts a month. Topics come from a keyword export, each writer takes a row, and the piece goes out when it is finished.
- What was right
The publishing discipline itself is real. Hitting a cadence for a year is harder than it looks, and the team built a working production line.
- What went wrong
No brief, so no piece answers a question anybody named. No original figure, so every piece is a summary of something the reader could have read instead. Nothing is reviewed after publishing, so the archive decays while the team adds to it.
- What should have happened
Cut to eight pieces a month. Each gets a one page brief with the question, the audience and one figure the piece must produce. Add a review date at publication and an inventory of what already exists.
What the right plan does to the economics Our own arithmetic on a modelled team: 20 pieces a month at roughly 600 dollars all-in each is 144,000 dollars a year. Cutting to 8 pieces frees 86,400 dollars, and spending a third of that on research and fact checking still leaves about 57,000. The output that gets cited is the third with original figures in it, which under the old plan was none of them.
Our own modelled team and arithmetic, offered as a worked example rather than a case The refresh that changed only the date
- What was done
Traffic falls, so the team runs a refresh programme: fifty old posts get a new publication date and two reordered paragraphs each.
- What was right
Recognising that the archive needed attention was correct. Most teams keep publishing new pieces instead, which is the more expensive mistake.
- What went wrong
Nothing new was added, so nothing changed for the reader, and readers can tell within one screen. Search engines see the same content with a new date, which is a signal they have handled for years.
- What should have happened
Refresh means one new figure, removal of advice that stopped being true, and a line saying what changed and when. Fifteen genuinely refreshed pieces beat fifty redated ones.
What the right plan does to the economics Our own arithmetic: fifty redated posts at two hours each is 100 hours. At a 60 dollar hourly rate that is 6,000 dollars spent to change fifty dates. The same 100 hours across fifteen real refreshes is under seven hours each, enough to find a new number and rewrite the weakest section, which is the version that holds position.
Our own arithmetic on a modelled team · Google Search Central guidance on content freshness
No figure here is attributed to a named company. Everything is our own arithmetic on modelled
teams, or our own measurement across our own sites, and each case says which. Teaching
material, not advice for your business.